Annie
by Fortitudine
Summary: Mike makes a friend and learns some hard lessons about life, love and loss.


**Annie**

_The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of hell, and a hell of Heaven. ~ _(John Milton)

When Aunt Daisy told us that Mrs. Pennington was coming to visit and bringing Annie, I was excited because they said at school that Annie Pennington was crazy and I never met a crazy person before. The closest would've been when Jess got asked to judge the cider contest last year at the Albany County Fair and we had to bring him home on his back in the buckboard. He sang all the way and Aunt Daisy kept putting her hands over my ears. I asked her if Jess had gone loco and she said no he was just sick and he sure was the next morning. Slim said Jess had _cideritis_ and when I asked Jess what that was Slim made a noise like his coffee went up his nose and Aunt Daisy said don't you have any chores to do in the barn, young man.

That's the trouble with being a kid, people are always making you go away and do chores or homework just when things get interesting. When Mrs. Pennington came over I was careful to be sitting real quiet at the kitchen table and pretending to do sums so Aunt Daisy wouldn't notice me while her and Mrs. Pennington drank tea.

Annie stood in the sunlight by the front door, talking to herself in a soft little voice. She was a lot older than me but not as old as Jess or Slim, and her long brown hair was in braids down over her shoulders, and her hands were white and curved like pond lilies. She was awful pretty even if she was crazy - if you saw her even once you'd remember her. Her eyes were light blue, kind of like Slim's, but when you looked there was nothing in them and it was as if you were seeing right through and off into the distance.

Everybody figured she lost her mind when her real family got killed - a line rider found her sitting next to a burned out wagon with a dead man and woman in it and nothing left to tell who she was or where she came from. Sheriff Corey sent a lot of telegrams but nobody came looking for her so the Penningtons took her in. I heard Aunt Daisy tell Slim it was because even though they had four grown boys Mrs. Pennington never got over their little girl Annie who died of diphtheria when she was fifteen.

I was trying to keep still and watch Annie but I must've moved or something because Aunt Daisy saw me and put up a hand to stop whatever Mrs. Pennington was saying.

"Mike, dear," she told me, "You and Annie go outside and get some fresh air. Mind you take good care of her."

That meant she and Mrs. Pennington wanted to talk about stuff that I wasn't supposed to hear, so I took Annie and we went out into the yard.

I bet she had been clean that morning, like me, but now the sleeves of her dress were dirty and her apron was pulled every which way. She had all kinds of things braided into her hair - some Indian paintbrush with yellow-red flowers, and the handle broken off a cup, and a piece of calico, and one of those stiff little china dolls they sell at the general store for a penny. There was a pencil in there, too, and a shiny green glass stopper from a bottle. She looked like a Christmas tree.

She might be a big girl but I figured that she wasn't really, not in any way that counted, so I took her around by the cottonwoods to show her the scrub jay nest. They had babies in the nest and would dive on you to make you keep away, and it was fun dodging them. When we got tired of that I picked up a feather off the ground, all shiny black and dark blue. She grabbed it out of my hand and right away put it in one of her braids.

"Do you want to see our lake, Annie?"

She made a _brrr-_ing sound, like I do sometimes when I stick my head in the horse trough and blow bubbles. I thought that might mean yes so we ran towards the lake and she didn't have any trouble keeping up with me.

I was starting to figure out that Annie was never quiet. I learned later that she didn't just hum or sing, lots of times she talked with real words, whole sentences even, but if I asked her a question her answer wasn't usually going to fit what I asked.

But that day I was still getting to know her. She seemed real happy, skipping along beside me. When we got there she threw her arms out and laughed out loud.

Then she went right into the water.

"Annie!"

She wasn't paying any attention and I had to wade in after her. I tried to pull her back but she wouldn't budge and I was scared she was going to keep walking. The lake bottom drops off after a bit and I didn't know if she could swim.

"What's goin' on, Mike?"

I was so worried I didn't hear him ride up behind us but when I looked up Jess was there. I explained to him about Annie and he got down and put out his hand to her.

"Come here, Annie." His voice was calm and friendly, like he was talking to a regular person, and she walked out of the lake and came to him.

"I reckon I'm going to get in trouble, Jess. Aunt Daisy said I was to take care of her." I sat down and poured the water out of my boots.

"Maybe not, Tiger. It's pretty warm today, we might get her dried out before you take her back. It's just her shoes and stockin's, and the bottom of her dress." Jess forgets he's supposed to be a grownup, sometimes.

We took her shoes off and opened them up and put them on a rock in the sun. Then we got stuck because I don't know how girls take their stockings off and Jess said he didn't either. Annie un-stuck us by taking off her own stockings while we turned around and looked the other way to be polite. After she got them off she got hold of the back of Jess' gunbelt and started pulling cartridges out of the loops.

"Hey!"

"She wants to put them in her hair," I told him.

"Not live cartridges, she don't. Give those back, Annie."

She wouldn't let go of the cartridges until he swapped her one of his pigging strings for them. She sat down with her skirts fluffed around her and we watched her unbraid her hair and braid the pigging string into it, and when her things were dry we got her back into them and then took her home. Jess wasn't sure how his horse would like Annie's skirts so we all walked, Annie in between us holding our hands and talking away.

Mrs. Pennington was ready to go - she looked a lot happier than when she came, somehow. Aunt Daisy does that to people. While Jess was handing Annie up into the buggy I tugged on Aunt Daisy's sleeve.

"Aunt Daisy? Can Annie come over again to play with me? It's going to be awful lonely now that school's out. I'd really like it if she could come."

Jess grinned at me - when I want something real bad I get this look on my face he calls my third-piece-of-pie look. Aunt Daisy asked Mrs. Pennington if that was all right with her. She said that I was very responsible and would watch out for Annie, and Mrs. Pennington agreed she'd send her over later in the week.

"That was a fine idea," said Aunt Daisy after they left. "It will do Annie a lot of good, I'm sure, and there are so many things here on the ranch for her to see. After all, you've only shown her the lake."

Jess' ears got red. "Dad-gum it, Daisy, how did you know?"

"Never you mind, Jess Harper." She turned to me. "You have to promise me that you'll watch her very carefully, Mike."

I promised. Aunt Daisy is spooky sometimes.

A couple of days later one of the Pennington boys brought Annie over. I was with Jess and we met him by the corrals.

"We'll be glad to bring her home for you," Jess told him. "Do you want her back before supper?"

"You can keep her for all I care," said the Pennington boy, and he whipped up the horse and drove away fast.

Annie didn't notice. She put her hand in mine and started chirping, kind of like a bird. Jess asked me if it was all right and I said yes so he went off to check fences and I took Annie to see the barn cats.

Our calico cat was always having kittens. Right now there were only two because Jess and Slim took the others away before their eyes opened, the way they always did, leaving a couple so she wouldn't miss the rest. When I was younger I didn't know any better but when I finally figured out what happened to the other kittens it made me mad and Jess had to sit me down and talk to me.

The cat had kittens about four times a year and she almost always had eight kittens. That meant at the end of a year's time there'd be thirty-two kittens growing up to be cats. Cats earned their keep by hunting rats and mice, Jess said, and there wasn't thirty-two cats' worth of rats and mice for them to catch. And every year there would be thirty-two more cats and they'd be sitting around eating their heads off and we couldn't afford it.

We were a working ranch, he told me, and everything on it had to pull their weight.

"D'you understand, Tiger?"

I did, sort of, but I wasn't happy about it.

Annie liked the kittens. She lay down in the hay and put them up under her chin like a necklace. The calico cat jumped on her stomach and started to purr and push her paws up and down. Annie's eyes got big and she put one hand on each side of the cat's ribs and sang a song to go with her purring.

After I finally got Annie out of the barn we poked around the old bunkhouse and the root cellar and I let her pet some of the more gentle horses. We threw sticks for Buttons and made paper boats to sail in the horse trough, and I showed her how to whistle through a blade of grass. It was a pretty good day. Aunt Daisy fixed rhubarb pie and chicken for lunch, and when Jess and me took Annie back to the Pennington's he let me handle the reins. Mrs. Pennington promised Annie could come over again soon and we drove home with the shadows already across the road and the night birds starting to call out to each other.

"Jess? Why is Annie crazy?"

"I guess nobody knows why that happens, Tiger. But a person's mind is like anythin' else, it can have things go wrong with it. You remember when Johnny Baumgartner fell under one of his pa's freight wagons and it went over his legs?

I remembered.

"And Johnny walks crooked now and probably will for the rest of his life. Well, Annie's mind is kind of like that. Somethin' hurt it, real bad, when her folks got killed, and now it just ain't workin' like it should."

"Will she ever get better?

"I dunno, Mike. I sure hope so. Things are goin' to be awful tough for her, if she don't."

"Isn't there anything we can do about it?"

"I think you're already doin' it, bub."

Mrs. Pennington started sending Annie over a lot. It was one of the best summers ever, and we never ran out of things to do. There were new calves and colts to feed and the baby scrub jays to watch learn how to fly, and of course the kittens to play with.

Once we got kind of muddy, up at the lake, and Aunt Daisy was pretty mad when we got back. Mrs. Pennington was there to fetch Annie and when she saw us her eyes squinched and her mouth pulled in at the corners. Aunt Daisy told me to go find Annie a cookie in the kitchen, and she took Mrs. Pennington into the front room. Mrs. Pennington began to talk in a high, tight voice.

"I don't know what to do, Mrs. Cooper - I'm almost at the end of my tether. It's not just that she looks so odd and people talk. She won't stay clean, and the things I have to comb out of her hair every day! But the nights are the worst." It sounded like she was crying.

"When we're sleeping she comes in and puts her hand on our faces. She wanders around the house, pushing over furniture and bumping into things, running up and down the stairs – the only nights I can get her to stay in bed are when she's been with Mike all day and she's tired out."

Aunt Daisy put her arm around Mrs. Pennington but she didn't seem to notice. "Once I found her stretched out on the pantry floor with her ear to the floor. I asked her what she was listening to and she said mice! She said that the mice were her special night friends!"

She stopped herself and said, "Not that I have mice in my pantry, Mrs. Cooper."

"Of course not, dear," said Aunt Daisy.

"She's afraid of the silence," I said. I didn't know how I knew, I just did.

Jess had come in for coffee and he was standing by the table with a cup in his hand.

"Makes sense," he said. "When you think about it, the two people who brought her into this world went out of it into a real big Silence - and they didn't come back. Maybe that's why she's afraid of it."

Annie just sat there and hummed.

When it rained we played in the attic or the barn, but when the weather was good we explored the ranch, all my favorite places and even some new ones. One day I took her up where Slim's folks are buried, his ma and pa and the little brothers that came between him and Andy. It's pretty up there and you can see past the house and down the road to where the Overland comes in from Laramie.

Annie sang all the way up the hill. None of her songs were ever ones I knew so when we got to the graves we sat down and I sang to her instead, _Camptown Ladies_ and _The Yellow Rose of Texas _and one of Aunt Daisy's lullabies.

_Sweet and low, sweet and low_

_Wind of the Western sea_

_Low, low, breathe and blow_

_Wind of the Western sea!_

_Over the rolling waters go _

_Come from the dying moon and blow,_

_Blow him again to me,_

_While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps._

Annie started singing it with me, as clear as anything.

_Sleep and rest, sleep and rest_

_Father will come to thee soon_

_Rest, rest, on mother's breast_

_Father will come to thee soon!_

_Father will come to his babe in the nest_

_Silver sails all out of the West_

_Under the silver moon –_

_Sleep my little one, sleep my pretty one, sleep._

Then she did something I never saw her do, not before that or ever again. Her mouth crooked down and tears started to slide down her cheeks. I didn't know what else to do so I let her cry. When she stopped, finally, I gave her my kerchief to wipe her face with.

Then she braided my kerchief into her hair. When she was done I walked her back to the house and Aunt Daisy sighed but let her keep it.

In August Slim went to Cheyenne on stage line business for two weeks and I had to help Jess while he was gone. Then after Slim got back one of the drivers busted his arm and Jess filled in while they hired a new one, so we were real busy. I hadn't seen Annie but once or twice in almost four weeks, and I missed her. When Mr. Pennington drove up one morning I went out get Annie, but he didn't bring her with him.

He came in the house walking real slow and his face looked grey. I knew something was wrong. When he sat down at the kitchen table with Slim and Aunt Daisy and started talking about Annie, I felt Jess take hold of my shoulder and I knew that Jess knew it, too.

"She's worse, Mrs. Cooper. We thought maybe with a good home and us to care for her, she'd start to get better but nothing we've done has worked. I'm afraid that my wife isn't going to be able to take much more."

He was twisting his coffee cup around and not looking at any of us. Aunt Daisy put her hand over his and patted it, and her eyes were all teary.

"We wrote to a place in Denver. It's the territorial asylum for the insane and since she's an orphan and doesn't have any family, they'll take her for nothing. We hate to do it but we just don't see any other way."

He tried to smile at Aunt Daisy. "I just wish I could be sure we're making the right decision."

Slim cleared his throat. "It may or may not be the right decision, Tom - but it's the necessary one. No one's blaming you."

"Thanks, Slim. We're going to take her to Cheyenne to catch the train there. I wanted to ask if I could arrange for the tickets and get her onto the stage at your place, instead of bringing her into Laramie. We think it would be better for her than being at the depot with a lot of strangers watching. Annie, she doesn't take to strangers."

I couldn't help it. I jumped up out of my chair and yelled at him. "If Annie doesn't take to strangers why are you making her go live with them?"

"_Mike!_" Slim and Aunt Daisy said my name at the same time and I knew I was going to catch it, later, but I didn't care.

"I want to know why!"

"Mike." Jess' voice was quiet. "We got harness to mend, you come with me."

He bunched his eyebrows together and when Jess does that you don't argue with him. We went out to the barn and he set me to cutting rawhide strips so he could splice the harness.

"Why are they sending Annie away?" I finally couldn't keep still. "It ain't right. She'll be scared. She's sweet and nice and I bet she's never hurt anything in her whole life, ever."

"It ain't the Penningtons' fault, Mike. They got a ranch to run and a pack of boys to feed, and Annie can't help around the house or with the chores. Missus Pennington has to spend a lot of time takin' care of her and they don't have the money to send her to a special doctor, one that might be able to cure her. Annie – well, Annie is just too much for the Penningtons to handle right now."

"Couldn't she come live with us?"

"Likely Annie would be too much for us to handle, as well. We don't have a room for her and it would be a lot of extra work for Aunt Daisy."

"I'd take care of her."

"You're startin' back to school soon. And besides, Annie would need clothes, and food, and -"

"She's like the kittens, ain't she, Jess?'

He got a surprised look on his face like I'd punched him and then he said, kind of sad, "Yeah, Tiger. I guess she is like the kittens."

I felt bad all day - I had a stomach-ache and my throat hurt. I couldn't eat my supper and Aunt Daisy wanted to give me a dose of tonic but I ran out of the house and hid in the barn loft. And when Slim came out calling for me I stayed there with the cat family.

After a while I heard somebody climbing the ladder. It was Jess.

"Thought you might be here." He sat down next to me and I got in his lap like I used to do when I was little.

"Jess, why do people have to go away?"

"Wish I knew the answer to that, Tiger."

He was quiet for a bit, thinking.

"Do you remember last winter when you were studyin' geography, and the teacher assigned you that one place over there in Europe?"

"You mean Lux…Luxemburg?" I had got in trouble with Slim for sassing Miss Davenport because I said I was going to be a rancher and didn't need to learn about some dumb old country I couldn't even say the name of.

"Yeah, that one. Well - makin' a friend is kind of like learnin' all about a new country. You take the time to study up on it and after a while you get to where you think you know everything there is to know.

"Then one day somebody tears up the map and tells you this place ain't there no more. All that time you took to get to learn it by heart, and it's gone and it ain't never comin' back. If you're lucky - " he stopped talking for a minute and when he started again his voice wasn't much more than a whisper.

"If you're lucky you got somethin' to remember them by. Maybe it's a photograph, or somethin' that used to belong to them like their jacket still hangin' by the door. Or even just a memory of the last time you heard them laugh, or the way - "

He broke off and his hand rubbed my back like he does when I'm sick or can't sleep. "I'm sorry, Mike. It's awful hard, I know."

"Does it ever stop hurting?" I was thinking of Annie, but of my folks, too, and Taffy the collie dog who died before we got Buttons.

He drew his breath in and then let it out again, real slow. "No, it don't. It eases some, but it never stops, not entirely."

We sat there listening to the cat and her babies making soft friendly noises in the hay until it got dark. I guess I must've fallen asleep because the next thing I knew it was morning and I was waking up in my own bed. And when I went to breakfast Aunt Daisy and Slim didn't say anything but Aunt Daisy gave me an extra helping of fried apples.

The day the Penningtons took Annie away they got to the ranch just as the eastbound stage pulled in. Slim and Aunt Daisy asked Mr. and Mrs. Pennington inside for coffee and Annie stood on the porch and sang to Jess and Mose while they changed out the teams. She was wearing a clean dress and her hair was brushed smooth and twisted around her head like a young lady's. It almost didn't look like Annie, without anything braided into her hair.

I went behind the house to where the scrub jay nest was in the cottonwood tree. Those jays dove at me again and one of them hit me on the arm this time, but I found a couple of feathers laying on the ground and I picked out the nicest one. I brought it back and slipped it into Annie's hand when no one was looking and she leaned over and kissed me.

It wasn't loving like when Aunt Daisy kisses me goodnight or slobbery like when Buttons kisses me, or even prickly like when Miss Abercrombie our Sunday School teacher does. It was just full of sweetness and for a minute I thought her eyes had something at the back of them and weren't empty any more. But then Mrs. Pennington came up, all fussy and fidgety, and they got on the stage and Mose drove them away.

Jess put his arm around me. "What'd you give her, Tiger?"

I might've known because he doesn't miss much.

"A jay feather for her to put in her hair. Do you think they'll let her keep it, at the 'sylum?"

"I don't know if they will or not, Mike."

"I'm going to ask Mrs. Pennington if I can have Annie's address there so I can write her and send her another one, just in case."

"You do that."

"Jess? If I save up my pocket money can I go visit Annie in Denver?"

Jess got the look on his face that he does when he doesn't want to tell me something because it's going to hurt. But he told me anyway because Jess doesn't fib to me.

"I don't know, Mike. It costs a lot for a ticket to Denver - it would take you a long time an' you might not get to see her." I guess I looked disappointed because he said real fast, "But if that's what you want, Tiger, you go ahead."

We started to walk back into the house, and I made up my mind right then that when I got big enough to work for wages, I was always going to have enough folding money so I'd be able to take care of the important things. Like Annie.

_For Kathy, who likes Mike._


End file.
